When Ambient musician Terre Thaemlitz came
to New York to study painting, he was disappointed by the politics of the gallery
scene. As Thaemlitz recalls, he turned to deejaying "as something that was
immediately social. I'm still kind of working on this idea of audio as a social
thing that is always one element of a larger environment which includes visual
stimuli, etc."

His approach to sound is often graphic. "I put a lot of emphasis on
structure. When I was painting I was into staunch minimalism - the materiality of
the object itself was the focus, as opposed to an illusion or metaphor of space
or physicality. This was an attempt to make the viewer aware of my constructive
processes, and their interpretive processes, as social events, rather than
allowing the paintings to exist is some apolitical and metaphysical reams of
'high art.'

"I try to do this with music as well, but it's different. People have a much
more intense relationship to recorded sound - it often constitutes a large part
of a person's sense of identity and permeates all areas of their lives, which
makes it more difficult to [abstract] the 'personal' into the
'political.'"

Thaemlitz's latest music
(Soil on Instinct)
may seem minimalist, but each composition stems from a solid concept. For
instance, "The idea of 'Elevatorium' was of elevator music as something
canned and over-processed, and the idea of how sound functions in a larger
environment - either an enclosed environment such as an auditorium, or just
socially as a whole. You're continually barraged by this over-processing of sound
that's packaged and presented to you, but the way it's presented to you gets
overwrought by context, such as somebody driving by in a Jeep playing something,
or hearing the radio from the bodega down the street. All of these are things
which people put time into packaging and presenting to you sonically, and, at the
same time, it's just being totally overwritten by all these conflicting
environmental circumstances."

In a way, this artist has come full-circle to the portrayals of a painter, but
with different tools: "Whether it's a representation of a mathematical
formula like a sine wave, or whether it's a representation of some acoustic
instrument, everything digital is always a representation." (JK)